I got to the Mescal Club at five minutes before six and climbed the steps to the office upstairs. I knocked on the heavy mahogany door and it buzzed open. The office was an oblong, thirty-five feet long and maybe fifteen or twenty feet wide. The walls were bare redbrick and the floors were polished wood. There was a desk at the far end, in front of a large, plate-glass window. In the middle of the floor there was a nest of armchairs and a sofa around a coffee table, and against the right wall there was a large, wooden dresser with a tray of bottles and glasses.
Rusanov was sitting in an armchair with a glass of cognac in his hand, smiling up at me. On his right was the tall guy I’d met before, during my interview. Rusanov gestured me in.
“Close door, Special Ops. Get drink. Sit here beside me.”
I went to the tray and poured myself a ten-year-old single malt, then sat in the chair opposite the tall guy in the suit, with Rusanov on my right. He was still talking in his staccato, article-free bursts.
“Igor has contract for you. You sign. Make you manager of club. We can this way explain big increase in income, huh?” He laughed like he’d said something real funny. “Also bonus sometimes, yuh? Now you sign contract and I tell you nice job. You make fat money.”
Igor reached down for an attaché case he had beside his seat, opened it on the coffee table and pulled out a three-page contract. I took it and read it carefully. I was surprised to see it was a standard contract of employment. I signed it with a signature that wasn’t mine and handed it to Rusanov. He initialed it and gave it to Igor who witnessed it, rose and left. It was a bizarre, law-abiding ritual that allowed me to commit crimes on Rusanov’s behalf.
“Now, we talk business. I am Russian, Special Ops. You know this. I have good friends in Russia, powerful people. Good friends, bad enemies.” He leered and made one of his tectonic rumbles. “Here, in Bronx, we can make much money. Much money. With drugs, with prostitutes, with protection.” He shook his head like a grizzly bear who has become aware for the first time of the beauty of the Rocky Mountains. “So much money here. But money is like shit. It attract many bugs. Flies all coming to shit. Here we have Mexican flies and Albanian flies.”
He made an elaborate shrug with his big shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth.
“Mexicans no such big problem. Some are useful friends. Mexicans only want sell: sell coke, sell heroin, sell new shit that is killing everybody, driving crazy...”
He made a crazy face and laughed real loud.
“We can work with Mexicans. They make product, we sell product. Good deal.” He sighed a sigh that was heavy and loud. “But Albanians, Rudaj Gang, the Albanian Boys, big problem. Good organized, tight!” He clenched his fist to indicate what he meant by tight, and repeated, “Very tight. Family, clan, Albanian government very close with Mafia. Big problem.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Not like the Russian Mafia, then...”
He looked about as amused as a polar bear with a zit on its ass. Then suddenly grinned and rumbled a laugh.
“Albanian flies motherfuckers and must die. Rudaj Organization receiving big shipment from Mexico. Coming in big RV from Arizona. We gonna take shipment, fifty kilo heroin, fifty kilo cocaine. Same time we gonna kill Aleksio Marku, new head of Rudaj Organization. We hit so hard, they never gonna get up again.”
I nodded once, letting him know I was not impressed. “That’s the plan, what’s the strategy?”
He grinned and nodded.
“That plan, what strategy? I like. I like this. Yes. That plan...” He shrugged, nodded, spread his hands. “But what strategy? How we gonna make it happen? Good...”
He was quiet for a while, studying his glass of cognac. When he finally spoke, it was to the glass. He had become sour, like the glass had let him down badly.
“Lunchtime, corner of Waterbury Avenue and Commerce Avenue, by Hutchinson River. There is big parking lot. Two men bring RV and park there. Four men from Rudaj go in Mercedes SL 550. They parking beside. In trunk is about three and half million bucks. Maybe little more. Plan is, Marku’s boys, from Rudaj Organization, take RV and boys from Arizona take Mercedes. Simple.”
“Where do Marku’s men take the RV? It’s not an easy thing to hide.”
He shrugged again. “Simple. Other side of river, East Tremont Avenue, Marku’s Used Car Mart. Put RV at back of lot for sale. That night take out the stash and distribute, one kilo here, two kilo there, thirty, forty distributors.”
I nodded. “You want me to kill three of Marku’s men after the guys from Arizona have left. I keep one alive and find out where Marku is. Your boys take the RV and I go and visit Marku.”
He leered. “Is good.”
“Yeah, is good, but to be really good you need to hit all his operations at the same time. You need to send boys to every operation he has.”
He shook his big head. “He has twelve operations around Bronx. Maybe fifty men. I cannot...”
“Bullshit. We select which operations to hit on the day. The night before we place bombs in the others, synchronized to go off at the same time. You run protection in the building trade?”
“Of course.”
“Then you can get dynamite. We can rig them to be detonated by a simple phone call. I’ll carry a burner. As soon as I kill Marku, I make the calls and we blow the guts out of the Albanian Mafia. After that you order your men to make any remaining hits.”
His eyes were wide, his mouth slack. He gurgled with pleasure and said, “Yes, oh yes. That is good.”
“When is the delivery due?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“How many men have you got that are well trained and you can rely on?”
“Twenty, maybe twenty.”
I thought for a moment. “OK, I need to meet with them, five at a time. We’ll annihilate the Albanians from the Bronx. The Bronx will belong to us.”
He liked that.
I spent the rest of that evening, and the rest of the night until two AM, in Rusanov’s office, talking to his men in small groups and discussing the plans for the following days.
The next day I returned to the club at noon. I had selected a couple of guys to work with me. I didn’t want a squad who could become a problem. I just wanted two guys who were used to taking orders and who I could deal with. They were Fjodor and Dima, both Russian Special Forces and both with experience of active service. Fjodor was an easygoing lunk with a big mustache and an easy laugh, who had seen action in Chechnya and somehow survived. According to Dima it was because he was too stupid to know when he’d been shot. I thought maybe that was true.
Dima was tall, lean and a wiseass. He had also seen action in Chechnya and had survived by either murdering or raping everyone he came across who wasn’t in Russian uniform. Sometimes he had done both and thought it was funny when he said, “But not necessary in that order, right?”
He smoked Russian cigarettes and drank prodigious amounts of vodka, like he thought being a stereotypical asshole was a smart thing to do. The two of them suited me just fine.
I taught them how to make detonators from a bunch of burner cells I’d told them to buy, and we rigged five bombs, concealed in kids’ rucksacks. Finally, at one thirty AM I gave them their final briefing and loaded four of the rucksacks into the trunk of my VW.